About Me
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I was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1918 to a Jewish family from Rovno, Ukraine. My grandmother insisted my first name be Louis, but my parents always called me Leonard, as they liked the name better. I had my name changed to Leonard officially when I was sixteen. My father, Sam Bernstein, was a businessman, and initially opposed my interest in music. Despite this, my father frequently took me to orchestra concerts. One time, I heard a piano performance and was immediately captivated; I subsequently began learning the piano at a young age. As a child, I attended the Garrison and Boston Latin School. When my father heard about the piano lessons he refused to pay for them, so I taught young students myself and used that income to pay for my own piano lessons.
After graduation from Boston Latin School in 1935 I attended Harvard University, where I studied music with Walter Piston and was briefly associated with the Harvard Glee Club. After completing my studies at Harvard I enrolled in the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where I received the only grade of "A" that Fritz Reiner ever awarded in his class on conducting. During my time at Curtis, I also studied piano with Isabella Vengerova and Heinrich Gebhard.
During my younger years in New York City, I enjoyed a promiscuous sexual life, mostly with young men. After a long internal struggle and a turbulent on-and-off engagement, I married Felicia Montealegre Cohn on September 9, 1951. Some have said this was in order to increase my chances of obtaining the chief conducting position with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, though popular opinion also holds it was just my bi-sexual mindset. Dimitri Mitropoulos, music director of the New York Philharmonic at the time and one of my mentors, advised me that marrying would help counter the gossip about my sexual life and appease the conservative BSO board.
Felicia and I had three children, Jamie, Alexander, and Nina. During most of my married life, I tried to be as discreet as possible with my extramarital liaisons. But as I grew older, and as the Gay Liberation movement gained increasing momentum, I became more emboldened, eventually leaving Felicia to live with companion Tom Cothran. Felicia took up with actor Michael Wager. Some time after, I learned that my wife was diagnosed with lung cancer. My relationship with Cothran had deteriorated, so I moved back in with my wife and cared for her until she died. Some people, such as my son, Alexander, believe that I essentially blamed myself for her death, and disliked myself intensely after her passing. Some claim to see a change in my conducting after Felicia's death as more somber and heavy, more "wrung-out," with grossly elongated structures, although others see this as just another example of the manner in which many artists exaggerate their original conducting style as they get older.
I have been highly regarded as a conductor, composer, pianist, and educator, and probably best known to the public as long-time music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, for conducting concerts by many of the world's leading orchestras, and for writing the music for West Side Story. All told, I wrote three symphonies, two operas, five musicals, and numerous other pieces.
On November 13, 1943, having recently been appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, I made my conducting debut when Bruno Walter was ill. I was an immediate success and became instantly famous since the concert was nationally broadcast. The soloist on that historic day was cellist Joseph Schuster, solo cellist of the New York Philharmonic, who played Richard Strauss's Don Quixote. Since I had never conducted the work before, Bruno Walter coached me on it prior to the concert. After World War II my career on the international stage began to flourish. In 1949 I conducted the world première of the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen. I was named Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958, a post I held until 1969. I became a well-known figure in the U.S. through my series of fifty-three televised Young People's Concerts for CBS, which grew out of my Omnibus programs that CBS aired in the early 1950s. I became as famous for my educational work in those concerts as for my conducting. Some of my music lectures were released on records, with several of these albums winning Grammy awards. To this day, the Young People's Concerts series remains the longest running group of classical music programs ever shown on commercial television. They ran from 1958 to 1972. More than thirty years later, twenty-five of them were rebroadcast on the now-defunct cable channel Trio, and released on DVD.
In 1947 I conducted in Tel Aviv for the first time, beginning a life-long association with Israel. In 1957, I conducted the inaugural concert of the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv; I subsequently made many recordings there. In 1967 I conducted a concert on Mt. Scopus to commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem.
In 1966 I made my debut at the Vienna State Opera conducting Verdi's Falstaff (production by Luchino Visconti, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Falstaff). In 1970 I returned to the State Opera for Otto Schenk's production of Beethovens's Fidelio. In 1986 the State Opera had me conducting my "A Quiet Place." My final farewell to the State Opera happened accidentally in 1989: Following a performance of Modest Mussorgsky's Khovanchina I unexpectedly entered the stage and embraced conductor Claudio Abbado in front of a stunned, but cheering audience.
Beginning in 1970, I conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, with which I re-recorded many of the pieces that I had previously taped with the New York Philharmonic, including sets of the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Mahler, Brahms and Schumann. I was also appointed in 1973 to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair at my alma mater, Harvard University, to deliver a series of 6 lectures on music. Borrowing the title from a Charles Ives' work, I called the lecture series "The Unanswered Question" which discusses the evolution of western classical music up until that time. The lecture now survives both in book and DVD form today.
I received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1980.
On PBS in the 1980s, I was the conductor and commentator for a special series on Beethoven's music, which featured the Vienna Philharmonic playing all nine Beethoven symphonies, several of his overtures, and the Missa Solemnis. Actor Maximilian Schell was also featured on the program, reading from Beethoven's letters.
On Christmas Day, 25 December 1989, I conducted Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in East Berlin's Schauspielhaus (Playhouse) as part of a celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The concert was broadcast live in more than twenty countries to an estimated audience of 100 million people. For the occasion, I reworded Friedrich Schiller's text of the Ode to Joy, substituting the word "freedom" (Freiheit) for "joy" (Freude). "I'm sure that Beethoven would have given us his blessing", I said at the time.
I was a highly-regarded conductor among many musicians, in particular the members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, of which I was a regular guest conductor. I was considered especially accomplished with the works of Gustav Mahler, Aaron Copland, Johannes Brahms, Dmitri Shostakovich, George Gershwin (especially the Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris), and of course with the performances of my own works. (Unfortunately, I never conducted performances of Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, nor did I ever conduct Porgy and Bess.) I had a gift for rehearsing an entire Mahler symphony by acting out every phrase for the orchestra to convey the precise meaning, and of emitting a vocal manifestation of the effect required, with a subtly professional ear that missed nothing.
My final performance at Tanglewood was on August 19, 1990, with the Boston Symphony playing Britten's "Four Sea Interludes" and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. A longtime heavy smoker, I had battled emphysema from my mid-20s; I suffered a coughing fit in the middle of the Beethoven performance which almost caused the concert to break down.
